Mean Justice (61 page)

Shortly after one in the morning on February 19, 1999, two detention officers at the jail went to the isolation cell because, they would later report, Danny Dunn was yelling and banging on the door. When the officers opened the cell, however, they found their prisoner lying quietly on the floor. When he tried to get up, one of the officers pushed him back down with his boot. A struggle ensued. More detention officers came. They used pepper spray and “carotid holds” that block blood flow to the brain through pressure to blood vessels in the neck. Then the unruly inmate was dragged out into the cellblock hallway and placed in leg irons. When it was over, Danny Dunn was dead. His last words, screamed after he was doused with a searing shot of pepper spray to the face that brought him to his knees, were, “It burns, it burns!”

Afterward, jail officers denied striking Danny during their struggle, saying they only used “pressure” to restrain him as he writhed and aimed wild kicks at them. None of the jail officers was injured. An autopsy would report that the thin, pale son of Pat and Nancy Dunn died of massive internal bleeding from “compressive trauma to abdomen.” He had a broken rib, a bruised torso, and a badly lacerated liver—the cause of the bleeding. A lifetime of excessive drinking may have made the liver particularly vulnerable to injury, it was reported. The coroner’s office—part of the sheriff’s department—determined the fatal injuries occurred during the struggle with officers, but that the death itself was accidental.
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It is a finding that has left Danny’s family, particularly his mother, Nancy Dunn, livid. She does not understand why her injured and delusional son was jailed instead of given medical treatment. She does not understand how a man in an isolation cell, designed to muffle noise and prevent him from harming himself or others, could have made such a racket that he had to be restrained by three deputies using their leather boots, caustic spray, and choke holds. She finds it hard to accept the notion that a mere accident could have injured her son’s liver so badly that it was nearly cut in half by the force of the trauma he suffered. She knows that X-rays taken after his bicycle accident showed no broken ribs, but that his autopsy showed one rib had been shattered—and that the break was located in a position that could have caused his liver injury.
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She fears Danny might have been targeted for revenge and abuse in the jail, either because of the publication of
Mean Justice
and the ensuing publicity, in which the Dunn name figured prominently, or because Danny exposed deputies to AIDS, or simply because he mouthed
off too much, which even she concedes would not be unusual for Danny. She wants—needs—to know the truth of this. If the tragedy unfolded as the sheriff’s department claims and the detention officers are blameless, Nancy Dunn says, let that be determined by an outside, independent investigation. Nothing else will satisfy the family.

But there has been no outside investigation of the circumstances surrounding Danny Dunn’s demise, and none is likely, unless his mother decides to sue and launches her own investigation, a daunting prospect on her high school counselor’s salary. Only one agency has examined what happened at the jail that night: The Kern County Sheriff’s Department. The same sheriff’s department that investigated Pat Dunn for murder and that had custody and control of Danny Dunn when he died also investigated the younger Dunn’s death, then cleared itself of any wrongdoing.

•   •   •

In April 1999, as prosecutors drew up legal briefs opposing Pat Dunn’s bid for freedom, his friend and former business partner, Rex Martin, received an unexpected telephone call. The caller offered something that had eluded the defense team for six years. He provided seemingly irrefutable corroboration of the central theme of Pat Dunn’s defense—that he had been framed by a convict desperate to avoid his own prison sentence.

At the trial, Rex Martin had been a key witness on this point, claiming to have witnessed Jerry Lee Coble casing Pat’s house in the weeks after Sandy’s murder. Rex swore he followed Coble, memorized his description, and wrote down his license plate number some three of four weeks after Sandy vanished to give to the sheriff’s department.
The defense had argued this occasion marked the first time Coble ever visited the Dunns’ neighborhood, a reconnaissance mission that enabled the informant to construct a phony eyewitness account, which he then used as leverage to negotiate his plea bargain. But Coble swore the only time he passed by the Dunn house was on the night of the murder. Detective Soliz denied being told about the license number. And Deputy District Attorney John Somers stood up before the jury and branded Rex Martin a liar with a financial motive to concoct a cover story for his friend. The jury went with Somers’ version of events; Rex left the courtroom livid, his faith in law enforcement shattered.

Six years later, his voice still shook with the memory of it as his lifelong friend, Bob Patterson, spoke to him on the phone and asked him to recall the events surrounding the trial. Patterson had just finished reading
Mean Justice,
he told Rex. One passage in particular caught his attention: the one about a curious defense discovery that went nowhere, the Department of Motor Vehicles printout on Coble’s license number, created at the Bakersfield Police Department right around the time Coble was seen outside Pat’s house.

“You know who ran that license number, don’t you?” Patterson asked his friend. And when Rex, puzzled by the question, had no answer, Patterson said, “It was me.”

At the time of the Dunn murder and trial, Bob Patterson was Bakersfield’s chief of police, one of the most respected figures in law enforcement in his community. He had since retired. “Don’t you remember?” he continued. “You wanted to know if that might be an unmarked police car hanging around outside Dunn’s house, so you asked me to check it out.”

And with that, Rex did remember. He had forgotten all about it, mostly because it seemed so insignificant at the time, and because another friend, a retired sheriff’s deputy, had promised to pursue the matter—something that was explored in-depth at the trial. The occasion was easy to forget because Rex had never heard back from Patterson. The former chief explained he had never said anything about it at the time because the mysterious green car Rex followed came back registered to an ordinary citizen—Coble’s mother. The chief dismissed it at the time as not worth mentioning to Rex, and he, too, had forgotten all about it. After all, Coble’s role in the case would not be known to Pat or anyone else for months. Patterson’s city police department had nothing to do with the investigation of Sandy’s murder—that was a county sheriff’s case, completely separate. By the time Pat’s trial rolled around, Rex and Patterson forgot all about their inquiry into the car registration—until the book jogged Patterson’s memory.

“I have no doubt whatsoever that Rex was telling the truth when he testified he saw Coble,” Patterson says now. “Because he told me all about it at the time.”
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Patterson’s recollection puts the defense case in an entirely new light. Bob Patterson is not only a veteran investigator and police chief, with an impeccable record—he’s a friend of District Attorney Ed Jagels. Prosecutors could never brand him a liar as they did with Rex Martin, nor could they challenge his recollection of the date in question, because the computer printout he requested is dated: July 27, nearly four weeks after Sandy disappeared, exactly when Rex recalled following Coble. Deputy DA Somers and Detective Soliz, who had argued that the motor vehicle printout was meaningless, were mistaken.
Unless the ex-police chief is lying, too, there is no way the incident outside Pat’s house could have been concocted, as Somers exhorted jurors to conclude in convicting Pat Dunn. Jerry Coble
did
stalk Pat Dunn. Then he denied it in court.

With that one phone call, the defense had been given tangible proof to back up their theory that Pat Dunn had been framed.

•   •   •

Nothing, it seems, is ever final in the case of
The People vs. Patrick O. Dunn.
Marie Gates, the kindly older woman who swore at Pat Dunn’s trial that Sandy announced she wanted a divorce, thereby providing motive for an otherwise senseless crime, now says Sandy was not planning to divorce Pat after all. Marie was really the one who brought up the subject of divorce in their last conversation together, not Sandy, Gates now maintains. “Tell him to take a hike,” Marie recalls urging, when Sandy complained about Pat’s vile temper when he was drunk. But, as Marie now tells it, Sandy said no, she did not want to divorce Pat. “When he’s not drinking, he’s very nice,” Marie recalls Sandy saying. “I’m going to talk to him about it. See if he’ll change.”
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This is far different from her damning trial testimony, and it would diminish the web of circumstantial evidence spun by John Somers. It also matches a similar statement that Kate Rosenlieb recalls Sandy making—though Kate never shared this particular recollection during Pat’s trial. It is impossible to know which version of Marie Gates’ story to believe; she now also claims Pat Dunn confessed outright to the murder in her presence, something she never mentioned before in any statement, in or out of court. “I heard Pat Dunn say to his own mother that he
killed Sandy,” Gates says. “He just said it right out, that he killed her, and that his mother should keep her dang mouth shut. He didn’t know I was there, but I heard it.”
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This completely contradicts her statements to detectives and testimony at trial, where she said nothing about a confession, and recalled Pat telling
both
his mother and her to keep their dang mouths shut about Sandy being missing. This new revelation does, however, fit the pattern Marie displayed before Pat’s trial. Her consistent altering of her account, with each change more damning of Pat, suggests that Marie Gates, though well-meaning, is not a credible witness and never was. She has told so many conflicting versions of the same events that the truth can no longer be determined. The Kern County authorities, of course, were happy to overlook inconsistencies in witnesses when they helped convict Pat, and the defense never brought these matters to the jury’s attention. Both sides, it seemed, were focused on strategy, on winning, on building a case—for this is how our adversarial justice system is expected to work—and yet, somehow, this vaunted process, this crucible of truth our courtrooms are said to be, ended up masking, rather than uncovering, the truth. The jury was allowed to believe that Marie Gates was an utterly credible and consistent witness. And they voted to convict accordingly. It is as telling as anything in this case that such questions do not even merit mention in Pat’s appeal. For all their power to harm in the real world, they are but harmless error under the law.

•   •   •

In the spring of 1998, as Pat Dunn began his sixth year in prison, another Kern County murder case with remarkable parallels to his own came to an abrupt and very different end.

Marie Haven, a prison guard in Kern County, had been arrested for murdering her ex-husband with the help of a fellow guard named George Curtis. Both were charged with capital crimes.

As in the Dunn case, financial gain was supposed to be the motive: this time, in the form of a half-million dollars in retirement benefits and life insurance proceeds. Like Pat, Marie Haven was said to have behaved in a most peculiar way immediately after the murder. Detectives decided that she seemed more interested in a quick ten-thousand-dollar disbursement from the insurance company than in grieving for her former husband. And, as they had with Pat, detectives disregarded a reasonable explanation for this behavior: The financially strapped Haven family needed that insurance money to cover funeral costs.

As in the Dunn case, there was no physical evidence linking either Haven or Curtis to the crime. And, as in the Dunn case, investigators attempted to overcome this lack of tangible evidence by relying on an informant as their star witness—an informant who, like Jerry Coble, had a checkered past, dubious credibility and a possible motive to lie. (The informant was Curtis’s ex-girlfriend, and the breakup had not been amicable.) Yet detectives and prosecutors pressed ahead with their case, even after this woman admitted to lying about critical evidence in the case. She also confessed to destroying evidence in a 1991 welfare-fraud case and to inventing a twin sister to hide the fact that she had been a prostitute.

There was one big difference between Pat Dunn’s prosecution and this case, however: The key informant’s credibility problems were not kept hidden, but were exposed in open court. Defense attorneys grilled her on
the witness stand during a preliminary hearing, forcing her to admit her lies and past misconduct. In the course of her testimony, she claimed her right to remain silent and asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination five separate times. When the hearing ended, the judge reluctantly agreed that the minimal evidence needed to bring the pair of prison guards to trial had been presented by the prosecution. But he made it clear there was no way they could ever be convicted with such testimony.

After Haven and Curtis had spent one hundred days in jail, the Kern County District Attorney’s Office apparently came to the same conclusion. The authorities dismissed all charges and the two walked free. During that one-hundred-day period, they had lost their jobs, Curtis lost his home, and Haven watched members of her own family turn against her, even though, under the law, she and Curtis were innocent and always had been.

Later, in the comfort of her home, Marie Haven found herself wondering why the detective on the case was so convinced of her guilt and dismissive of her version of events, while at the same time so willing, even eager, to take the word of a witness with questionable motives and credibility. And in this lies one final common thread linking Haven and Curtis to Pat Dunn, the one that caught Pat’s eye and had him sitting bolt upright in his cell as he read about the case in the newspaper. The detective on the now-discredited Haven murder case was one Pat Dunn knew very well: Kern County Sheriff’s Detective John Soliz.